The Last Leading Lady

By RICHARD CORLISS

Broadway, that fabulous invalid, never looked frailer or more gallant, never seemed more aware of its glorious past and its tenuous future, than on Tony Award night this past June. Musty old plays and musicals hogged the spotlight from newer works. Producer George Abbott, 106 years old and looking every minute of it, showed up to remind the assembled swells and the TV audience that Damn Yankees, which he had confected four decades ago, was again the liveliest show in town. The cathedral of commercial theater had reopened as a museum and a mausoleum. The place was awash in memories of more glamorous nights.

Few actresses had invested theatrical glamour with such elegance and intelligence as Jessica Tandy. So when she appeared at the ceremony with her husband Hume Cronyn to accept the first-ever Tonys for Lifetime Achievement, a hush fell on the heart of Broadway. Most of those in attendance knew that for five years Tandy had been battling ovarian cancer. Most other viewers would realize that the actress, who had turned 85 five days earlier, was in physical distress. That made her patrician poise a brave smile in the face of death. A lady never admits to agony. And Tandy, in the theater and in her late stardom in movies, was every inch a lady -- perhaps the last great lady the performing , arts will see.

"I am so grateful for this being voted, this award, together, to be shared together," Tandy said, nodding toward the man who had been her co-star and consort for 52 years, and who now held her hand. Then she addressed her own mortality, as well as her place among the theater's immortals: "And I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to step once more upon the stage."

Those were Tandy's final steps on the stage. Her death last week marked the end of a grand procession of characters she created by inhabiting them. This London-born actress's signature roles, as Blanche du Bois in the original 1947 production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and as Daisy Werthan in the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy, were both mid-century Southern belles. They were also polar opposites: a woman plummeting from nymphomania into dementia; a lady struggling to balance propriety and humanity. For Streetcar she won the first of three Tonys (the others were for two collaborations with Cronyn, The Gin Game in 1978 and Foxfire in 1982); for Miss Daisy she earned an Oscar as Best Actress in 1990. Two years later she received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Fried Green Tomatoes. By then Tandy was more than an actress; she was a living monument to the old- fashioned belief in survival of the flintiest.

That image might apply to her career no less than to the characters she played. Nature and training had typecast Tandy as a leading lady -- her features clear and smooth, her chin held at a regal angle, her posture that of a strict, brilliant schoolmistress -- but it took time to achieve the eminence she deserved. When she arrived in the U.S. in 1940, she found that the work did not match her dreams; she was employed in the British embassy as a cipher clerk, and on radio as Princess Nada in the serial Mandrake the Magician. She had been acting a quarter-century before Streetcar, and would act another 40 years before Daisy. Her self-confidence was a long time coming too. During Streetcar rehearsals, she and Cronyn were concerned that Marlon Brando would blow her off the stage. It never happened; the strong, thin reed of her technique stood up to the hurricane of his impulsive Methodology.

Still, she needed sustaining support, and she got it in Cronyn, the smart, craggy Canadian she married in 1942. They had two children; her previous marriage, to actor Jack Hawkins, produced one child.

In his 1991 autobiography, A Terrible Liar, Cronyn says he fell in love with Tandy's laugh. "I adored the way she made fun of me and the world in general. I was captivated by her sensitivity, talent, generosity to others, compassion, and of course her beauty and the fact that she seemed totally unaware of any of these qualities. She still is, and at past 80 now, more beautiful than ever. If, as has been said, you have the face God gave you until the age of 40 and that, after that, you have the face you've made for yourself, then Jess' beauty is the sum total of her character."

Toward the end, Tandy brought dignity and defiance to the illness that was ravaging her; she wore her pain as gracefully as she had once donned Blanche's frilly frocks or Miss Daisy's housedress. Her Tony speech was a great performance because, trouper to the end, she offered a last lovely face to the theater community. But it was also a fearless declaration of vulnerability, a display of the flesh beneath the flint. Like the boldest modern actor, this classically trained lady was daring the audience to be a party to revelation: Look at me; see what's inside -- the ache, the character, the beauty.